1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a memory apparatus, and more particularly, relates to a non-volatile memory apparatus and a data de-duplication method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
In comparison with traditional hard disk drives, flash memory storage equipments have favorable reading/writing performance and low power consumption, and this is why the flash memories are widely applied in data storage systems. In certain storage applications, the same data may have multiple duplications in the storage equipment, and these duplications will increase a data written count. How to reduce the amount of writes while improving write performance as well as endurance is one important issue that needs to be addressed.
The existing approach can perform a compression for the data and then writes the compressed data into the flash memory. This data compression technique can reduce a data volume of duplicated data so as to reduce the amount of writes. In any case, the data volume that the data compression technique can reduce depends on data patterns. In certain applications, the data cannot be compressed at all. In other applications, the data can be well compressed. Consequently, because the data patterns are not exactly the same in terms of compressibility, the length of each data after compression may have a different change. If the each of the compressed data has a different length, the data compression may consume a lot of overload of FTL (Flash Translation Layer) just for managing the compressed data.